President Obama’s last best hope

Obama is down to drawing on his dwindling reservoir of personal capital on Capitol Hill. | AP Photo

Several leading House GOP voices on intelligence and security matters are opposed to Obama. That set includes Rep. Tom Rooney (R-Fla.), of the Intelligence and Armed Services committees, and Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), of the Intelligence Committee. Right now, Obama would lose a majority of the votes among Republicans on the Intelligence Committee — though several members of the panel have left themselves enough wiggle room to get on board at some point.

“He’s never invested in the personal relationships to have sincere conversations about weighty issues, and it shows,” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), who is leaning toward a “no” vote. If Obama had better ties to lawmakers, “it would certainly be a factor,” he said.

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The White House is pushing ahead with its “flood the zone” approach — its most intensive lobbying campaign since the push for health care reform.

The president and top administration officials have made contact with more than 85 senators and 165 members of the House. They’ve enlisted respected voices in both parties to argue the case on their behalf. They’ve courted members with briefings in the Situation Room and dinner at the vice president’s residence. They’re paying particularly close attention to constituencies sympathetic to the personal argument — Hispanics, African-Americans and progressives.

The path to success rests on the notion that the more that lawmakers hear the president’s case, the more inclined they will be to support the call for action.

Administration officials said informal whip counts by news organizations and Capitol Hill offices are imprecise and that many lawmakers remain undecided and open to persuasion, particularly from the president himself. The leadership of the Congressional Black Caucus, for example, asked its members last week to limit their public statements until they received more details, including a White House briefing Monday with National Security Adviser Susan Rice.

Obama continued his personal conversations with lawmakers over the weekend, making calls from the White House and stopping by the dinner hosted Sunday night by Vice President Joe Biden for Republican senators. He’ll conduct interviews Monday with six TV networks. On Tuesday, he’ll make a rare trip to the Capitol to meet with Senate Democrats and later deliver the address on the eve of the first procedural vote Wednesday in the Senate, which is expected to approve the resolution.

The House is the challenge.

Like their Republican colleagues, many Democrats on key national security committees — such as the top two Democrats on the Armed Services Committee, Reps. Adam Smith and Loretta Sanchez — aren’t on board. Rep. Brad Sherman, the leading Democrat on the Foreign Affairs subcommittee that deals with arms control, also opposes it.

“I haven’t heard any of our interests,” Sanchez said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday.

Rep. Henry Waxman, a Jewish Democrat old enough to remember the end of World War II, is typically among Israel’s strongest allies in Congress. But even with the Israeli government, AIPAC, and several of the most senior Jewish lawmakers pushing for intervention, Waxman remains on the sideline of the debate. One clear complication in securing his vote: Waxman’s facing a primary challenge in his liberal California district.

“He is undecided,” spokeswoman Karen Lightfoot told POLITICO.

There’s another major concern for House Democrats who are inclined to believe that the use of chemical weapons should draw a response: a possibility the White House will back authorization for a much broader offensive in order to bring Senate Republican hawks on board. The theory behind that strategy is that GOP hawks Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham can build momentum for the strikes in the Senate and then work the House side of the Capitol for the president.

That’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the House’s view of McCain and Graham, said Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who has strong ties to the White House, and it jeopardizes the president’s credibility when he tries to convince liberals and isolationists that strikes would be limited in scope and duration.

“Sen. McCain is a great American, but he doesn’t have a large constituency in the House, either among Republicans or Democrats,” said Van Hollen, who, with Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), has written a tightly restrictive alternative measure that would limit a Syria mission. “The risk [White House officials] run is that by trying to placate Sen. McCain, who wants more broad U.S. intervention, they put at risk the argument that this military action is designed to be narrowly targeted and focused.”